(LifeSiteNews) — Elon Musk condemned the “death cult” of far-left environmentalism and its “corrosive effect on civilization” in a far-ranging interview on the “Joe Rogan Experience” this week.
Musk, who purchased Twitter/X in a $44 billion deal last year, said the social media platform had been used as an “arm of the government” as well as a “far-left information weapon” that spread an “extinctionist” “mind virus” worldwide.
“If you start thinking that humans are bad, then the natural conclusion is that humans should die out,” Musk told Rogan in the nearly three-hour podcast episode Tuesday. “That death cult was in charge of social media, and still largely is.”
Musk said civilizational collapse occurring in real-time is evident just steps away from the X headquarters in San Francisco. He described the streets of the once-prosperous California city as being like a “zombie apocalypse.”
For the SpaceX founder and Tesla CEO, the “philosophy [that] led to that outcome” is a far-left hyper-environmentalism that sees “humanity as a plague on the surface of the earth.”
Musk, who has routinely challenged the “overpopulation” narrative, contending that the true problem facing the planet is actually underpopulation, argued that the earth could actually sustain 10 times its current human population without being overtaxed.
He said radical environmentalists who oppose human population growth are members of a “death cult” who are actively “propagating the extinction of humanity and civilization,” and warned that artificial intelligence (AI) in the hands of “extinctionists” would mean that the new technology’s “utility function will be the extinction of humanity.”
READ: Elon Musk calls out radical environmentalists who think ‘Earth would be better off with no people’
According to Musk, pro-extinction radicals in San Francisco and Berkeley were given a “technological megaphone” to blast their ideology worldwide with social media, including Twitter, which he said became “an accidental far-left information weapon” to “propagate what is essentially a mind virus to the rest of earth.”
“Old Twitter was fundamentally controlled by the far left,” said Musk, whose April 2022 purchase of Twitter triggered outrage from leftists who objected to Musk’s plans to loosen up speech restrictions on the platform.
Prior to Musk’s acquisition, Twitter routinely censored content from conservatives and notably squashed information that did not comport with the prevailing government narrative on COVID-19.
“It was like Pravda, basically,” the tech entrepreneur explained, describing the platform before he purchased it as “a state publication” in which “Republicans were suppressed at 10 times the rate of Democrats.”
Reacting to Rogan’s observations concerning Twitter’s censorship of respectable yet dissenting voices amid the COVID hysteria (Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was among those censored), Musk said “old Twitter” was in essence controlled by the government, a fact “not well understood by the public.”
In addition to the censorship of conservative perspectives, Musk said, even “middle of the road” opinions were shut down.
The billionaire pointed out that the deep blue California cities of San Francisco and Berkeley operate within a “niche” far-left philosophy to which “everything is to the right, including moderates.”
While “under normal circumstances” the “bad effects” of such a political viewpoint would be “geographically constrained” within that 10-mile radius of the San Francisco/Berkeley area, Musk said, the “technological megaphone” of social media unnaturally amplified the region’s far-left agenda to the rest of the world.
Highly intelligent and skilled engineers drawn to Silicon Valley, he said, had “created an information weapon that was then harnessed by the far left, who could not themselves create the weapon but happened to be co-located where the technologists were.”
He said Twitter’s alleged rightward shift after his purchase of the platform just means it’s actually moved to the center.
For Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” his platform ought to be representative of “the collective consciousness of humanity,” which would necessarily include views and opinions that some people don’t appreciate or agree with.
“But that’s humanity,” he said.